This is an exploration of the interaction between African American religions and Jewish traditions, beliefs, and spaces. The collection's argument is that religion is the missing piece of the cultural jigsaw, and black-Jewish relations need the religious roots of their problem illuminated.
Category: Religion

Tudor explains how many African peoples came to think of themselves as descendants of the ancient tribes of Israel. Pursuing medieval and modern race narratives over a millennium in which Jews were cast as black and black Africans were cast as Jews, he reveals a complex interaction between religious and racial labels and their political uses.
Category: Social Science

Over the last several decades, an astonishing phenomenon has developed: a Jewish rebirth of sorts occurring throughout Africa. Different ethnic groups proclaim that they are returning to long forgotten Jewish roots and African clans trace their lineage to the Lost Tribes of Israel. The Black Jews of Africa addresses the elaboration and the development of Jewish identities by Africans, and presents one by one the different groups of Black Jews from western central, eastern and southern Africa and the ways in which they have used and imagined their oral history and traditional customs to construct a distinct Jewish identity.
Category: Religion

Dr. Ben destroys the myth of a "white Jewish race" and the bigotry that has denied the existence of an African Jewish culture. He establishes the legitimacy of contemporary Black Jewish culture in Africa and the diaspora and predates its origin before ancient Nile Valley civilizations.
Category: Social Science

Over the last hundred years, in Africa and the United States, through a variety of religious encounters, some black African societies adopted – or perhaps rediscovered – a Judaic religious identity. African Zion grows out of a joined interest in these diversified encounters with Judaism, their common substrata and divergences, their exogenous or endogenous characteristics, the entry or re-entry of these people into the contemporary world as Jews and the necessity of reshaping the standard accounts of their collective experience. In various loci the bonds with Judaism of black Jews were often forged in the harshest circumstances and grew out of experiences of slavery, exile, colonial subjugation, political ethnic conflicts and apartheid. For the African peoples who identify as Jews and with other Jews, identification with biblical Israel assumes symbolical significance. This book presents the way in which the religious identification of African American Jews and African black Jews – “real”, ideal or imaginary – has been represented, conceptualized and reconfigured over the last century or so. These essays grow out of a concern to understand Black encounters with Judaism, Jews and putative Hebrew/Israelite origins and are intended to illuminate their developments in the medley of race, ethnicity, and religion of the African and African American religious experience. They reflect the geographical and historic mosaic of black Judaism, permeated as it is with different “meanings”, both contemporary and historical.
Category: History

This book describes the ways Jews imagined and treated Blacks during the first three centuries of the Atlantic slave trade and European colonialism. Using many previously unexamined sources, it goes beyond mere inter-ethnic polemics to lay out for the first time the scope of Jewish anti-Blackness in places such as Portugal, the Ottoman Empire, Italy, Amsterdam and the Caribbean. Readers will see that Jewish attitudes and behavior remained barely distinguishable from general European trends, hardly benign, but far less intense.
Category: History

Seldom has a small grass-roots organisation polarised American Jewry as did the American Association for Ethiopian Jews (AAEJ) and seldom has a grassroots organisation been so successful. How were five governments persuaded that it was to their interest to allow the threatened Jews of Ethiopia to fulfil their dream of rejoining their brethren in Israel? From 1974 through 1991, active AAEJ members demonstrated that it was possible to rescue black Jews from Africa. They enlisted the support of college students, American Rabbis, editors of the Jewish press and other Zionists. Lenhoff's memoir provides many untold stories behind this historic drama: How Israeli Ethiopian Jews and Americans Jews worked secretly to rescue over 1,000 Ethiopian Jews. How Jerry Weaver masterminded Operation Moses -- the first mass exodus of black Africans as free people -- not as slaves. How two gutsy American women set up a situation allowing Israel to rescue 14,000 Ethiopian Jews in one day of Operation Solomon. There is more: the intrigues in Israel between the politics of religion and the Law of Return; the daring heroic adventures of courageous Ethiopian Jews as they trekked from Ethiopia to Sudan. These are the stories of activists who challenged the establishment and won! Black Jews, Jews, and Other Heroes is written from the first-hand experiences of one of the AAEJ's three Presidents, scholar-activist Howard Lenhoff. Lenhoff and Gefen Publishing House are especially pleased to present also as part of this book, the untold story of "righteous gentile", Jerry Weaver.
Category: Biography & Autobiography